


you can't choose what stays and what fades away

by stellahibernis



Series: say my name [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, M/M, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, memory recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 10:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2225037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellahibernis/pseuds/stellahibernis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is a lot like that, remembering. The memories of the man named James Buchanan Barnes sometimes come back with perfect clarity, but there’s no order to them, no sense of time. There’s only now. The memories are clear but strange, it feels like they don't belong to him at all, not like the memories of the Winter Soldier that occasionally surface. Those memories hit him like a freight train, like the ground after a fall.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can't choose what stays and what fades away

Looking through the scope is always a curious thing. One can see better in a way, more details than with bare eyes, but also lose the concept of what's happening on the whole, outside the field of vision. For a moment there's only the target, and it's easy to feel detached from everything one sees, not to care about what or whom the crosshairs settle upon.

It is a lot like that, remembering. The memories of the man named James Buchanan Barnes sometimes come back with perfect clarity, but there's no order to them, no sense of time. There's only now. The memories are clear but strange, it feels like they don't belong to him at all, not like the memories of the Winter Soldier that occasionally surface. Those memories hit him like a freight train, like the ground after a fall.

There doesn't seem to be anything special about this memory that comes while he's idly following snowflakes fall outside the window. In it he's just looking through the scope at the snowy forest, the enemy combatants hurrying around, carrying those strange guns that deal the blue death. He doesn't know why this particular memory would have stuck through all the mind wipes. It doesn't feel important; there must have been dozens of days like it. Why this, instead of his first day at school or his mother's voice?

He knows this memory is from after; after he had been taken to hell and pulled out by a man who looked familiar and alien at the same time. A man who wore his best friend's face but was impossibly tall and strong, and whose blue eyes he knew better than anything else. This is only a small fragment, he doesn't know what happened before or after this flash of memory, not even where he was at the time. He doesn't know if it's accurate what he sees in his mind. It doesn't feel real and it feels all too real, as if he was still there, lying in the snow.

He feels the cold seeping into his bones from the ground, but he's not even sure if this feeling is accurate. Does it feel like this lying on the cold ground, or is he remembering an entirely different cold? It might be so; he feels cold at the oddest moments, often when he logically knows it isn't cold at all. It's a cocoon of cold all over him, and he can't escape it, it's like nothing can break through it.

He remembers a light pressure from a hand on the small of his back, and it's radiating warmth even through a leather glove and his winter uniform. Maybe it is an important memory after all.

***

Another memory; lying on the cold ground again, looking through the scope. Similar but different day. He's alone this time, on a ridge, the forest providing cover for him. Ahead in the clearing are the ruins of an enemy base they had raided and his team searching for survivors and experimental weapons. Based on his jumbled memories, he spent quite a bit of the war trekking through the European woods on the way to different Hydra-bases and subsequently taking them down. They never failed. No one suffered serious injuries either. Not for the longest time, and they started to feel invincible.

It wasn't true, of course.

The crosshairs settle for a moment on a white star on blue, circled with red and white, glimmering in the faint light. For a moment he follows the blue-clad figure and then continues  scanning the environment. From the ruins emerges a man, pointing one of those Hydra-guns at the captain. His gun steadies, crosshairs pointing at the middle of the torso. An exhalation, light squeeze of the trigger. The man collapses and the captain turns to salute him.

He completes the ritual automatically; eject the old cartridge, reload, start scanning the environment again. His hands are steady, breathing even, eyes clear. The adrenaline that spiked when he saw the enemy is gone. The cold calm that sometimes settles on him during battle has completely enveloped him like an armor, like ice. It doesn't feel like anything, killing, when he's like this. All that matters are the facts. The captain (his captain) lives to fight another day. Someone else is dead.

On reflection, in the memory it doesn't feel any different from when he pulled the trigger as the Winter Soldier. He's not sure if there is any difference.

***

He falls.

It's cold cold cold.

***

There's a duality about his sense of self when he remembers his time as the Winter Soldier. He, the person he's now, is shaken, disgusted, angry. A million other things. Confused. It's entirely different for the soldier, who is not a person to feel these kinds of things. There's only methodical calmness, nothing matters but his instructions, his mission. Everything else is inconsequential, unless it's an obstacle, in which case it (often people) gets removed. His every move is filled with purpose.

He knows his target is inside the building across the street, he even knows which apartment, but he can't see the man through any of the windows, so he can't take the shot. He can wait, he has time. He's never failed, and will not this time either. Situation gets more complicated when another man, whom he'd seen a moment earlier go in through the front door, comes back out and enters the apartment through a window. Automatically he notes the ease with which the man climbs, the strength and agility. This man could be a threat. He could take the man out easily enough, but it would only alert his target, and his mission includes only the one target anyway.

He gets his chance a bit later, when lights come on for a bit, and he sees shadows moving inside. He takes careful aim, and shoots three times through the wall. His target goes down. Mission completed.

In a moment he finds out that the other man is indeed a threat. He's running as fast as he can, and still the other man keeps up even though he has to go through the obstructions inside the building. On another roof he turns as the man  throws something at him. He catches it easily in his left hand and for a moment they both stand frozen. The shield in his hand, because that's indeed what it is, is red, white and blue, muted in the dark, not too heavy but sturdy. It's a strange choice of a weapon, seemingly meant for defense, but he knows that without his metal arm he would have had hard time catching or deflecting it. He feels a tiny trickle of familiarity in all of this at the back of his mind, but pushes it away as he throws the shield back at the man. It has nothing to do with his mission, all he has to do now is return to the base.

He's gone in the shadows before his throw connects.

***

Under the sunlight, the shield's primary colors are nearly blinding. Just the fact that the three people that were in the car are still alive is a testament to their skills. They managed to avoid his shots through the car roof and to get out of without serious injuries. He's prepared, though; the targets were known to be difficult to kill. He grabs his rifle equipped with a grenade launcher, and the shield's bright colors disappear in an explosion.

The man goes down, at least for a bit, and they concentrate on the woman. She fights back efficiently as one with her status should, but it's only a matter of time before she's cornered. The team couldn't contain the man, though, neither of them actually, so he'll just have to take care of it all himself. Doesn't matter, he always completes his missions.

When it comes to fighting one on one, they are a nearly perfect match, blow for blow, and it feels like it could go on for forever. It has never happened as far as he can remember. There's something stirring in him, something other than the deep instilled need to complete the mission he's been given. It's curiosity. Is it possible there's someone that cannot be easily pushed aside, like all his targets before? Let's see what he's got. There's no worry, though. He doesn't even remember what that is. He can take the blows, come up with new ways to attack. There will be a chance to take the man down. There always is.

It doesn't even take that long. His mask comes off, and the man he's been fighting does something completely illogical. He abandons his defensive stance; he's open, as if in a shock. Every instinct of the Winter Soldier screams to kill him now when he's vulnerable, to finish the mission and yet he does something just as illogical. He doesn't kill the man. He can't.

("Bucky?" "Who the hell is Bucky?")

Suddenly there's another voice in his head, screaming. You know him you know him you know him. And it's true, for a moment. Until the pain comes, until they take it away.

***

It comes back, though, as it must.

And he watches the man he knows better than himself fall.

***

Trying to piece memories back together is always difficult, and probably more so alone. But he doesn't want help, not now. Maybe not ever. There are ways to verify some of the things he remembers, and some things he finds out never happened at all. Problem is, everything seems as real to him, whether it's a true memory, a nightmare or a dream.

He's gone by many names since he walked away from the river shore, away from the one truth he knew at that point. Since then he's found more truths, more lies, and a sense of self, a way to be a person. Of sorts, maybe.

He was told his name is James Buchanan Barnes, but he doesn't use it. There are pictures of a man with his face, only younger, on the internet, in the history books, in the museum. Always with that name. He says it occasionally to himself in the mirror, but it never feels like his. He's not that that man anymore, and maybe the man's too long gone to ever come back.

He reads his own history, or the history of the man he maybe once was, and he doesn't know what to make of it. Some things ring true, others are definitely plausible and probable, even if he doesn't remember them. But there are other things presented as truths that feel like lies, even if he cannot say why. There are gaps in his memory, over which no fragments connect. He might not even have realized this, except for the feeling that he's missing something important, something colossal. It should be right there. He has no idea what it is, and he knows that without it, he'll never be James Barnes.

Truth is, it did feel like his name, even after the fall, after his memories were taken away. Once, when it wasn't him saying it.

Captain America. Steven Grant Rogers. Steve. Target, enemy, mission, leader, brother in arms, friend?

There he is now, clad in blue darker than that time on the helicarrier, but unmistakable. The shield bright as ever. He's with his friends; a red-haired woman, a man with wings, another with a bow, one straight from myth calling lightning, a flying armor and a green monster barely in control. He has read about them as well, he knows about the Avengers. They're surrounded by enemies (machines, cyborgs, robots?), and they are winning, but only just. The shield flies, connects and comes straight back to the waiting hand. The crosshairs follow its path, making sure the robot it hits stays down. Now there's only one left, coming for the captain, but it’ll have no chance. Probably.

He doesn't remember pulling the trigger, but he must have, because the robot is down, and the sharp smell of gunpowder lingers in the still air. It was a perfect hit to the robot's power source.

The crosshairs settle again on the captain who turns, stance open, not trying to cover himself from the sniper. For a moment they lock eyes, even if he's the only one to know, since the distance is too big even for a superhuman eyesight unaided. This is one of those moments, a time to make a choice. He could stay, he could get help making sense of the mess inside his head. Maybe he would find out what he's missing.

He runs, he disappears. He's good at that.

***

He can't run forever, though, and as stubborn as he might be, Steve is more so.

Another Hydra-base in his crosshairs, more covert than the ones they raided during the war. They know what it is, though, and they will take it down. The time will come soon, but now they are just waiting. There's a barely audible creak of leather when Steve adjusts the harness that he uses to carry his shield on his back. The cold from the ground seeps slowly through his clothes, and it's like before.

Well, not exactly. There's a slight mechanical hum from his arm when he flexes the fingers, making sure everything works. And instead of a strangely functional misfit group of five men their backup is a woman with more diverse skill set than he can imagine and a man with mechanical wings. The three of them had appeared when he was in the middle of raiding one of the seemingly endless number of Hydra's safe houses, and at the end he just couldn't find any will to run anymore.

Steve had realized, even without him having to find the words to say so, that he wasn't ready to go back home yet, and accepted it. Now they take down the bases together, and it's much more efficient than when he was doing it alone. They give him the space he needs, and he's slowly learning to be with them, learning to hold idle conversation, learning to not flinch at the casual touch. His memories are still slotting in place, and he knows they will never be quite right, not quite in the correct order. He doesn't feel like James Buchanan Barnes, the big gaps are still there, waiting to be filled. He's starting to think those particular memories might never come back, and he wonders what it could be that he's buried so deep. Is it something bad, worse than everything else he remembers? Or something so precious he was afraid to lose that he built impregnable walls around it? Only now even he can't get through the barriers.

He feels like Bucky, though, when Steve calls him that, and he wonders if Steve knows what it is that he's missing. Steve never pressures him about his memories, but he is always willing to confirm and expand upon them. He gets the feeling that there's something they're not talking about. He doesn't ask. He doesn't even know what he should ask for.

It's almost time, Natasha whispers through their communicators and they all get ready. And then, like so many times before, but never in this century, Steve lays his hand lightly on his back, just for a moment. It's not so cold after all.

This is real. This is now.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Florence + the Machine song _No Light, No Light_. Unbearably perfect for Bucky and Steve.
> 
> The nature of the relationship is left somewhat ambiguous, since Bucky's memory is what it is. There will be a companion piece from Steve's point of view (although not the same timeline), which'll clear things up a bit.
> 
> Rant time: I thought I was done writing fics years ago, but apparently not. I have resisted before (Inception almost got me but no...), it was these two idiots and their complicated lives that reeled me in, and here we are. On reflection, I was probably lost when in 2011 after seeing CATFA I frantically googled to see if Bucky actually, truly died... After that it has been a long slow descent.


End file.
